Feb 8
Thanks to the work of David Henningsson, we now have a proper Apport symptom for audio bugs. It just got updated again to set default bug titles, which include the card/codec name and the problem, so that Launchpad’s suggested duplicates should work much more reliably.
So from now on you are strongly encouraged to report sound problems with
$ ubuntu-bug audio
instead of trying to guess the package right.
Jan 20
I finally listened to Sebastien Bacher and applied for GNOME commit rights yesterday, after hassling Seb once more about committing an approved patch for me. Surprisingly, it only took some 4 hours until my application was approved and my account created, wow! Apparently 71 patches are enough. 
With my new powers, I fixed a crash in gdm, and applied two stragglers into gvfs’ build system today.
More to come!
These days I often use launchpadlib in my projects for scripting access/modifications in Launchpad. While launchpadlib has quite a good API documentation, this only covers the method calls, not the attributes or collections. So it often takes some poking and trying until you figure out how to access/change things.
I found myself typing the same things over and over, so I finally wrote a little script called lpshell:
#!/usr/bin/python -i
import code, os, sys
from launchpadlib.launchpad import Launchpad, STAGING_SERVICE_ROOT, EDGE_SERVICE_ROOT
lp = Launchpad.login_with('test', STAGING_SERVICE_ROOT)
This logs into Launchpad and gives you an interactive Python shell with an “lp” object:
$ lpshell >>> lp.bugs[439482].duplicate_of
Update: I committed this to ubuntu-dev-tools now, renamed to lp-shell for consistency with the other lp-* commands.
Jan 1
Ich wünsche allen ein gutes, gesundes und erfolgreiches Jahr 2010!
Wir haben gestern mit ein paar Freunden gefeiert. Das neue Jahr haben wir gleich angemessen mit Wunderkerzen begrüßt:
(Klick auf Bild für größeres Format)
The days before Chistmas are a wonderfully quiet time to catch up on old work which otherwise just drowns in the daily noise. I got a lot of Apport cleanups and improvements done.
One particular highlight of 1.11 is that it is now easy and consistent to collect information for a bug report on one place/at one time and save it into a file
$ apport-bug --save /tmp/argh.apport udev
… and report that later on with
$ apport-bug /tmp/argh.apport
This can happen on an entirely different machine.
Yesterday PostgreSQL released new security/bug fix microreleases 8.4.2, 8.3.9, and 8.1.19, which fix two security issues and a whole bunch of bugs.
Updates for all supported Ubuntu releases are built in the ubuntu-security-proposed PPA. They pass the upstream and postgresql-common test suites, but more testing is heavily appreciated! Please give feedback in bug LP#496923.
Thanks!
Am Samstag waren wir wie schon viele Jahre zuvor bei Anne zum traditionellen Plätzchen/Pfefferkuchenhaus backen. Es ist wieder einiges zusammengekommen, und leeecker geworden!
Netti hat das halbe Wochenende damit verbracht, einen Adventskalender für mich zu basteln. Kann es kaum noch erwarten, morgen die erste Rolle aufzumachen!
Nov 28
On the long flight back from UDS-Lucid I read the Vala tutorial on my ebook, and did some of the exercises. I was curious about Vala because it combines the speed and memory efficiency of C in a sane C#-like language with proper memory management, exceptions, and without the silly “close to the metal” faff that is usually required in C.
And indeed I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not as convenient as Python, but really not far from it, and it’s faaaast!
Today I finally got back to this and wrote my first D-Bus example in vala which does a call to DeviceKit-disks:
using DBus;
int main(string[] args)
{
Connection con = Bus.get(BusType.SYSTEM);
dynamic DBus.Object dk = con.get_object(
"org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks",
"/org/freedesktop/DeviceKit/Disks",
"org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks");
ObjectPath[] devs = dk.EnumerateDevices();
foreach (ObjectPath o in devs)
stdout.printf("%s\n", o);
return 0;
}
Compile and run it with
valac --pkg dbus-glib-1 dbus-dk.vala && ./dbus-dk
and voila!
Nov 27
The day has come!
Yesterday I dropped the superfluous hal dependency from gparted, today I uploaded gdm to stop using hal for getting the keyboard layout and use libxklavier instead.
I also applied Julian Cristau’s udevified X.org branch to our xorg-edgers packages into my halsectomy PPA, created some udev rules for udev-based X.org input detection ([1], [2]), and off we go: that was the last hal reverse dependency. My system now fully boots and works without hal.
A while ago I introduced a script lp-project-upload to automate tarball release uploads to Launchpad.
Many people asked for further features, two of which I added now: First, it automatically invokes gpg to create a tarball signature (unless one is already present), and second it invokes an editor to specify changelog and release notes (just keep the files empty if you don’t need them).
Uploaded to lucid’s ubuntu-dev-tools, enjoy!